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This is a summary of Jon Krakauer´s Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster By writing Into Thin Air, Krakauer may have hoped to exorcise some of his own demons and lay to rest some of the painful questions that still surround the event. He takes great pains to provide a balanced picture of the people and events he witnessed and gives due credit to the tireless and dedicated Sherpas. He also avoids blasting easy targets such as Sandy Pittman, the wealthy socialite who brought an espresso maker along on the expedition. Krakauer´s highly personal inquiry into the catastrophe provides a great deal of insight into what went wrong. But for Krakauer himself, further interviews and investigations only lead him to the conclusion that his perceived failures were directly responsible for a fellow climber´s death. Clearly, Krakauer remains haunted by the disaster, and although he relates a number of incidents in which he acted selflessly and even heroically, he seems unable to view those instances objectively. In the end, despite his evenhanded and even generous assessment of others´ actions, he reserves a full measure of vitriol for himself. When Jon Krakauer reached the summit of Mt. Everest in the early afternoon of May 10, 1996, he hadn´t slept in 57 hours and was reeling from the brain-altering effects of oxygen depletion. As he turned to begin the perilous descent from 29,028 feet (roughly the cruising altitude of an Airbus jetliner), 20 other climbers were still pushing doggedly to the top, unaware that the sky had begun to roil with clouds. Into Thin Air is the definitive account of the deadliest season in the history of Everest by the acclaimed outside journalist and author of the best-selling Into the Wild. Taking the listener step by step from Katmandu to the mountain´s deadly pinnacle, Krakauer has his listeners shaking on the edge of their seat. 1. Language: English. Narrator: Daniel Hawking. Audio sample: http://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/059726/bk_acx0_059726_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

The Hydro-Metallurgy of Copper:Being an Account of Processes Adopted in the Hydro-Metallurgical Treatment of Cupriferous Ores, Including the Manufacture of Copper Vitriol (Classic Reprint) Manuel Eissler

The NBC journalist who covered - and took fire from - Donald Trump on the campaign trail offers an inside look at the most shocking presidential election in American history. Katy Tur was one of a select cadre of NBC reporters on the road during the grueling 2016 presidential campaign, reporting from small towns and venues across America for more than 16 months. At the beginning of the primaries, Tur was assigned the Trump campaign - a campaign widely considered a long shot by politicos and the media. But primary after primary, the novice outsider trumped his rivals and won the hearts and votes of many Republicans. His appeal to working-class whites, the GOP´s traditional middle and upper middle class base, and conservative evangelicals took him all the way to the White House, astonishing the nation and the world. Unbelievable is Tur´s inside account of being embedded with the campaign, revealing what it was like to report on the most combative and volatile major party candidate ever to run for office and win. At first, Trump tried to charm Tur into providing fawning coverage. When that didn´t work, he stooped to berating and shaming her, stoking the rage of his legion of supporters - many who threatened Tur and other penned-in reporters at his events. The vitriol reached such a fever pitch that following one rally, during which Trump launched a personal attack against her, the Secret Service had to accompany Tur to her car. But Katy was not alone. Millions of Americans watched in disbelief as Trump ordered Tur to ´´be quiet´´ during one of his many press conferences and called her ´´disgraceful´´, ´´third-rate´´, ´´not nice´´, and ´´Little Katy´´. In response, thousands of people across the country rushed to her defense, tweeting #imwithtur. Intriguing, disturbing, and powerful, Unbelievable is an unprecedented eyewitness account of the 2016 election from an intelligent, dedicated journalist at the center of it - a thoughtful hi... 1. Language: English. Narrator: Katy Tur. Audio sample: http://samples.audible.de/bk/harp/006227/bk_harp_006227_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

Four men in a rowboat make an historic attempt on the Northwest Passage to focus global attention on an environmental catastrophe. ´´Vallely transports the reader to places few will ever go: the very edges of the earth and of human endurance.´´ (Evan Solomon) In this gripping first-hand account, four seasoned adventurers navigate a sophisticated, high-tech rowboat across the Northwest Passage. One of the ´´last firsts´´ remaining in the adventure world, this journey is only possible because of the dramatic impacts of global warming in the high Arctic, which provide an ironic opportunity to draw attention to the growing urgency of climate change. Along the way, the team repeatedly face life-threatening danger from storms unparalleled in their ferocity and unpredictability and bears witness to unprecedented changes in the Arctic habitat and inhabitants, while weathering gale-force vitriol from climate change deniers who have taken to social media to attack them and undermine their efforts. 1. Language: English. Narrator: Graham Rowat. Audio sample: http://samples.audible.de/bk/reco/011998/bk_reco_011998_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

André Aciman has been hailed as ´´the most exciting new fiction writer of the 21st century´´ (New York magazine), a ´´brilliant chronicler of the disconnect...between who we are and who we wish we might have been´´ (Wall Street Journal), and a writer of ´´fiction at its most supremely interesting´´ (Colm Tóibín). Now, with his third and most ambitious novel, Aciman delivers an elegant and powerful tale of the wages of assimilation - a moving story of an immigrant’s remembered youth and the nearly forgotten costs and sacrifices of becoming an American. It’s the fall of 1977, and amid the lovely, leafy streets of Cambridge a young Harvard graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, longs more than anything to become an assimilated American and a professor of literature. He spends his days in a pleasant blur of 17th-century fiction, but when he meets a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver in a Harvard Square café, everything changes. Nicknamed Kalashnikov - Kalaj for short - for his machine-gun vitriol, the cab driver roars into the student’s life with his denunciations of the American obsession with ´´all things jumbo and ersatz´´ - Twinkies, monster television sets, all-you-can-eat buffets - and his outrageous declarations on love and the art of seduction. The student finds it hard to resist his new friend’s magnetism, and before long he begins to neglect his studies and live a double life: one in the rarefied world of Harvard, the other as an exile with Kalaj on the streets of Cambridge. Together they carouse the bars and cafés around Harvard Square, trade intimate accounts of their love affairs, argue about the American dream, and skinny-dip in Walden Pond. But as final exams loom and Kalaj has his license revoked and is threatened with deportation, the student faces the decision of his life: whether to cling to his dream of New-World assimilation or risk it all to defend his Old-World friend. Harvard Square is a sexually cha... 1. Language: English. Narrator: Sanjiv Jhaveri. Audio sample: http://samples.audible.de/bk/brll/004850/bk_brll_004850_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

National Bestseller A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-mountaineer Jon Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, saw nothing that ´´suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down.´´ He was wrong. The storm, which claimed five lives and left countless more--including Krakauer´s--in guilt-ridden disarray, would also provide the impetus for Into Thin Air, Krakauer´s epic account of the May 1996 disaster. By writing Into Thin Air, Krakauer may have hoped to exorcise some of his own demons and lay to rest some of the painful questions that still surround the event. He takes great pains to provide a balanced picture of the people and events he witnessed and gives due credit to the tireless and dedicated Sherpas. He also avoids blasting easy targets such as Sandy Pittman, the wealthy socialite who brought an espresso maker along on the expedition. Krakauer´s highly personal inquiry into the catastrophe provides a great deal of insight into what went wrong. But for Krakauer himself, further interviews and investigations only lead him to the conclusion that his perceived failures were directly responsible for a fellow climber´s death. Clearly, Krakauer remains haunted by the disaster, and although he relates a number of incidents in which he acted selflessly and even heroically, he seems unable to view those instances objectively. In the end, despite his evenhanded and even generous assessment of others´ actions, he reserves a full measure of vitriol for himself. This updated trade paperback edition of Into Thin Air includes an extensive new postscript that sheds fascinating light on the acrimonious debate that flared between Krakauer and Everest guide Anatoli Boukreev in the wake of the tragedy. ´´I have no doubt that Boukreev´s intentions were good on summit day,´´ writes Krakauer in the postscript, dated August 1999. ´´What disturbs me, though, was Boukreev´s refusal to acknowledge the possibility that he made even a single poor decision. Never did he indicate that perhaps it wasn´t the best choice to climb without gas or go down ahead of his clients.´´ As usual, Krakauer supports his points with dogged research and a good dose of humility. But rather than continue the heated discourse that has raged since Into Thin Air´s denouncement of guide Boukreev, Krakauer´s tone is conciliatory; he points most of his criticism at G. Weston De Walt, who coauthored The Climb, Boukreev´s version of events. And in a touching conclusion, Krakauer recounts his last conversation with the late Boukreev, in which the two weathered climbers agreed to disagree about certain points. Krakauer had great hopes to patch things up with Boukreev, but the Russian later died in an avalanche on another Himalayan peak, Annapurna I. In 1999, Krakauer received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters--a prestigious prize intended ´´to honor writers of exceptional accomplishment.´´ According to the Academy´s citation, ´´Krakauer combines the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer. His account of an ascent of Mount Everest has led to a general reevaluation of climbing and of the commercialization of what was once a romantic, solitary sport; while his account of the life and death of Christopher McCandless, who died of starvation after challenging the Alaskan wilderness, delves even more deeply and disturbingly into the fascination of nature and the devastating effects of its lure on a young and curious mind.´´